Linger
by Bainaku
Summary: Marceline's got a few questions about that shirt.


**A/N: **Okay, yeah, I caught the bug. Be warned. There are **implications **here.

**Words: **1,115

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**LINGER**

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Night curled its whiskers tight over Ooo, and the stars came out between them and winked like dew in their darkness. The peppermint breeze sighed through the parapets of the palace at the center of the Candy Kingdom, westerly tonight and forlorn too. On its furl rode the wail of the wolves. An idle ear turned to those distant yelping cries, Bubblegum folded herself down before her vanity's mirror. Her fingers twitched toward the hairbrush beneath it—quivered. Stilled. The window's jamb creaked and Bubblegum, eyes narrowed, flicked her gaze to her room's image in the mirror. There was her bed, its sheets turned down but undisturbed otherwise: a stack of treatises from the Nougat Marshes at her realm's fringe, the top page fluttering, its corner creased. Normal. Her own reflection stared back at her, of course, face perpetually flushed and rounded and soft, hair a nest of elastic tangles and rubbery snarls. Jaw tense, brow taut, she waited.

A voice manifested then, nearby her ear: "Man, you'll get an ulcer. Re_lax_, Princess."

Bubblegum shivered. She spun on the vanity's bench and there, like a lean gray goblin, was Marceline, the points of her fangs whickering sharp and quick over her lips, her thin shoulders blotting out the moonlight in the window. A mirror was no good for spotting vampires. Bubblegum had almost—but not quite—forgotten that. "I'm kidnapped often," snapped the princess, snatching irritably at her nightshirt's hem. "Forgive me for being on my guard."

"If you were on your guard," drawled Marceline, hooking her thumbs through her belt loops, "you'd have locked your window, wouldn't you?" She waggled said thumbs at Bubblegum and grinned, her tongue a red dart at the corner of her mouth. "C'mon," she insisted, sidling closer. "It's all right. It's just me, Bonnibel."

Bubblegum shivered again. The nightshirt stretched to her thighs at best—the night air whispering in through the window was cold, and Marceline's presence wasn't helping with the goosebumps either. "I can see that," she agreed, and asked next, "what are you doing here, Marceline?"

The vampire hovering two paces away shrugged and slid her hands free of her jeans. Lifting her guitar over her shoulder next, she cradled it as tenderly as she might a child—a lover?—and ran her fingers down the strings.

_Twnnnng_. The riff swelled to fill the night. The breeze was gone—the wolves too, lost on the plains. There was only the guitar and its pulse and Marceline behind it, smiling a slow, sinister kind of smile.

"That shirt," Marceline said when it was over. Her gaze dipped, traced the lines of the garment in question. Face burning, Bubblegum flared her hands over her lap. "Whoa," observed the vampire in immediate, teasing delight, "easy there, easy! What're you worried about? We're both girls here."

"A window didn't stop you," muttered the princess. "Why should my being a girl?"

"Hey, a window lock didn't tempt _you_. Why should I?" Marceline shot back. Her thumbnail caught the guitar's lowest string, scuttered there, hissed. The pair exchanged a sullen look and, with a huff, the taller of the two resumed, "That shirt. I had a question about it."

"Is that all—" The princess checked herself, biting down hard on her tongue. Marceline purred laughter and Bubblegum attempted a second time, words stumbling, running into one another, "What kind of question could you possibly have about this shirt? You used to wear it—you _gave _it to me—"

"Oh, just—you know," sighed Marceline. She lolled onto her back midair, the guitar strapped across her stomach. Her hair drifted, inky tendrils close enough now that Bubblegum could reach out and touch them if she wanted. "Pajamas. That's what you use the shirt for, right?"

Bubblegum blinked. Leaning back, she gestured to her top and agreed, "Yes. I'm wearing it now, aren't I?" She tacked on, "_Obviously_."

"Mmhm. Obviously"—the vampire volleyed the word back to Bubblegum—"you are." Her hand crept over the guitar's strings: her fingers walked between them. Bubblegum watched them and imagined them elsewhere, Nuts confound her. Heat drummed in her neck, made a desert of her throat's workings. "Pajamas," Marceline revisited. "Huh. You're a weirdo, then."

The princess jerked her eyes aloft. She caught Marceline looking at her, a trickle of dark, weightless hair slithering slow along the visitor's cheek and collarbone. "Weirdo?" echoed Bubblegum, and thoughtlessly reached out to flick away the hair. Surely it tickled.

Marceline's fingers were cold when they caught hers, and strong—they clenched around her hand and Bubblegum winced. "Weirdo," affirmed the vampire, wheeling forward. Her feet touched the floor, the heels of her boots clacking. The insides of her knees brushed Bubblegum's bare flesh in a sizzling scrape of denim. "I have to wonder what you were doing with a pajama top in the middle of the afternoon," Marceline continued. "You don't nap, Bonnibel. I remember."

The guitar's stem slid against Bubblegum's collar—the tip of Marceline's sharp nose stabbed her cheek. The princess managed, "I—"

"You were holding it and thinking of me, weren't you?" asked the vampire. Her fangs whispered over Bubblegum's jaw at the hinge—the princess felt her smile. "Clutching it?" She pulled away, studying the royal's face: laughed in the next breath, a wheeze in lungs not used to breathing. "Geez, you _were_! You're a little _groupie_, aren't you? Helplessly devoted—"

"Get out." Furious at herself—at her boiling cheeks, at the twitch of her hip toward the other girl's knee—Bubblegum tore her hand free of the vampire's grip and jabbed it at the window instead. "Get _out_, Marceline! That's—that's _disgusting_!" She added belatedly, "You have to be in a band to have groupies anyway!"

"Ooh, _well_." Marceline held up her hands, palms out—her guitar floated of its own will between them still, like an instrumental broom without the bristles. "Excuse _me_."

"Out," Bubblegum reminded her, and gestured to the window again.

"Bonnibel's a _weirdooo_," Marceline repeated fondly. She nevertheless kicked off and drifted placidly through the portal. She was already a smudge on the evening's horizon when Bubblegum, seething, slammed back the panes and yanked closed the curtains.

She stood for a moment in the dark, chewing her cheek and worrying her hands over the windowsill. Her fingers found the hooked clasp and toyed with it, quiet, and moonlight peeped through the curtains and washed her palms gray, like stone, like the mirror, like Marceline.

Bubblegum turned and crept to bed, her fists clutched in the nightshirt's fabric, her face turned away from the slippery shadows at the window. As ever, she couldn't bring herself to lock it.


End file.
